Sunday, August 26, 2007

At August 24, Mark Cuban made another attending grabbing headline at his blog---"The Internet is Dead and Boring." In the post, Cuban explained a viewpoint that "every generation has its defining breakthrough." Nevertheless I agree with this viewpoint, his evidence to support this viewpoint, which is the Internet, is awkward. Cuban claimed that the Internet was at present stopping evolving. The cycle of Internet evolution has come to its end. I am, however, quite doubt of this claim.

According to Wikipedia, the Internet is a worldwide, publicly accessible network of interconnected computer networks that transmit data by packet switching using the standard Internet Protocol (IP). If Cuban's assessment is only about the very low level machine protocols, probably it is boring since many of them have been standards and unlikely to be changed in the future. But just a little bit above these every bottom-level protocols, there are many new problems occurred during the web evolution. For example, how should we design better machine protocols to share semantics over the Internet? This type of demands regularly emerges above the surface when World Wide Web, the most important product due to the invention of Internet, evolves. In fact, we can predict that the upgrade of fundamental internet technologies will not stop before the end of WWW evolution.

In the post, Cuban emphasized the limitation of bandwidth on the Internet. Nevertheless this is a serious problem, it actually is a sign that we need creative innovations on Internet instead of being a signal that the Internet is dead and boring.

The size of bandwidth is always has its physical limit, but humans' demanding of greater bandwidth never ends. This basic contradiction on the Internet is actually a driving force leading new innovations on higher-performance data transmission over the Internet. Besides paving more optical lines underground, we can also invent new protocols and new internet communication models to solve the bandwidth problem. As a metaphor, the bandwidth problem on the Internet is similar to the limit of time in our real life. As we know, we only have 24 hours a day and this bandwidth can never be increased. But does it mean that we cannot have better communication among people due to this limit? Certainly not! We can have better scheduling and communication methods so that the time usage could be optimized. For many centuries, people still have ways to invent new ideas of using time. If innovations on using real-world time never ends, why should we be pessimistic about the dead of Internet due to the limit of bandwidth?

In conclusion, the Internet might be dead and boring some day, but it is definitely not at present. The living progress of web evolution seeks for new innovations on basic internet functions. The demand of better consuming of bandwidth also requires new innovations on the Internet. The future of Internet is exciting. Let's all look forward to the new innovations of the Internet!